An Interview Up Close, and Far Too Personal

February 17, 2014

TV Sports

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Interviews with athletes after a victory or loss are usually nonevents. The questions are banal, the answers rote. Truly sharp questions and genuinely spontaneous responses are endangered species. Then there was Christin Cooper’s interview of Bode Miller on Sunday after he won the bronze medal in the Super-G, which has ignited a debate about whether she poked too deeply at the scar tissue of his brother’s recent death.

She asked three questions of Miller about his emotions — all of which carried the subtext of the recent death of his brother, Chelone, and a high-profile custody battle between Miller and the mother of his 1-year-old son.

The issue is not the appropriateness of tying Miller’s palpable emotions to his personal travails. Any journalist would and should do that. The question is how far she was willing to pursue her line of questioning at a moment of triumph for Miller.

It had to be as clear to Cooper as it was to viewers that Miller was tearing up as she was speaking to him. Rather than pull back, she surged forward. Rather than shifting to another topic, she asked whether his performance was or wasn’t for Chilly, as his brother was called, and whom he was talking to as he looked into the sky before his race.

By now, Miller’s helmet was bowed, and he was crying, unable to answer.

I doubt it was her intent to make him weep, but that was the effect of question overkill. Taken one at a time, each question is reasonable, and if she had asked only one of them, Miller might not have wept and fallen to his knees. But the takeaway of asking all three was that she had badgered Miller, not asked him well-chosen questions gauged with a real-time understanding of his emotions. NBC milked the situation further by keeping its cameras on the scene for more than a minute, as Miller walked away, as he was comforted by various people and as he was embraced by his wife, Morgan.

This all occurred in Sochi daylight — many hours before the sequence aired in prime time, which suggests that the network believed it had covered the story tastefully.

On Monday, Jim Bell, the executive producer of NBC Olympics, defended the coverage as part of the network’s storytelling obligation during the Games.

“We have to make a lot of decisions every day on our coverage, and we made that one and we’re fine with it,” he said on a conference call with reporters that was primarily intended to reintroduce the prime-time host Bob Costas after a six-day absence because of a viral infection in both eyes.

Bell said he understood some of the criticism of Cooper, which he attributed to “shoot-from-the-hip reactions” by columnists and people on Twitter.

Bell deployed a defense against the mostly negative barrage of criticism: Miller’s kindhearted defense of Cooper on Twitter and in two appearances on NBC.

Miller proved himself a stand-up guy. He could have stomped away from Cooper. He did not. He taped a segment with Matt Lauer for NBC’s late-night studio program Sunday and then appeared with Lauer again Monday morning on “Today.” His gentle defense of Cooper came hours later, after he had time to think, and showed a maturation he probably would not have displayed at previous Olympics.

On “Today,” Miller called Cooper a “sweetheart of a person” who “didn’t mean to push.”

“I don’t think she really anticipated what my reaction was going to be, and I think by the time she sort of realized it, I think it was too late and I don’t really, don’t blame her at all,” Miller said. “I feel terrible that she is taking the heat for that because it really is just a heat-of-the moment kind of circumstance, and I don’t think there was any harm intended.”

Miller’s spirit here is generous. But a reporter asking questions should not be in the heat of the moment; she should be the calm, disinterested observer who asks the right questions of happy, stunned and disconsolate athletes.

For Bell, Miller’s words should help close the book on Cooper’s handling of the interview. If Miller had no problem with the questioning, Bell said: “I guess it ought to take some of the temperature down on it, or should anyway.”

For the past decade, NBC has tried to scale back its over-reliance on personal back stories (some tragic, some ordinary) as the fuel for its Olympic athletic narratives. The Miller interview raised that reputation again.

NBC had mentioned Chilly Miller’s death even before Tom Brokaw’s interview with Bode and Morgan Miller in advance of the medal-winning run.

With that story arc established in advance, there was no reason to dig deeply into it after the race. It reminded me of Jim Gray’s prosecutorial interview of Pete Rose before Game 2 of the 1999 World Series in Atlanta, where baseball’s all-century team was presented. Gray unleashed a cannonade of questions that were calculated to push Rose to admit that he had bet on baseball. Rose, a hard nut, did not budge.

Like Gray, Cooper lost sight of the context. Gray believed a celebration was a propitious time for a grim interrogation — and seemed unwilling or unable to stop.

Cooper believed that minutes after Miller won a bronze medal, in what might be his final Olympics, was the appropriate moment to fixate on still-raw emotions.

And NBC, to its detriment, elected to milk the Miller story without the judicious editing the network could have employed.